In a prior weblog posting, Intentionality as the Guide to Philosophical Thinking, I discussed this quote:
I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light. [Sir Isaac Newton]
I write often about my efforts to find better ways to describe and analyze our complex and complicated selves, our human individual selves and our human communal selves. This is not simply a matter of laying out a system of thought in a book or a few papers. Even something so seemingly straightforward to us as double-entry bookkeeping was considered for centuries to be a matter to be tackled only by those who could do higher mathematics. It took time for the ideas to properly shape the minds of modern men to those accounting ideas so basic to modern economies and the theories which try to understand them. I suspect that my proposal to learn how to speak of the richness of all created being, including human nature and human communities, from the ways that modern empirical thinkers have adopted to speak of electrons and protons, gravity and electromagnetism is at least as upsetting and intimidating to modern men as double-entry bookkeeping was to our 15th century ancestors. In fact, as I’ve noted many a time, I think that some historians and many novelists and more than a few brain-scientists, have done much to give us richer and more complex ways to discuss and analyze human nature and human communities. But the overall view we modern men hold of ourselves and our communities is fragmented and incomplete, not just compared to some vague idea of the perfect and full truth but in comparison to what we could do.
It takes time. We must “keep the subject of [our] inquiry constantly before [us], and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light.” We must intend to the state of fully minded creatures who can kind of, sort of, almost for just a second at a time, see and feel and think of the fullness of created being in a manner consistent with what’s known of those aspects of created being studied by modern mathematicians and physicists.
And so it was that yesterday I was walking down the street as I cooled down from a run and I found myself trying to bypass the geodesic curvature stuff and to visualize myself moving in the appropriate way to be sure I was walking a great circle. Feet pointed straight down to the center of the earth. Check. And I’m walking straight as if continuously being sliced in half by a plane connecting me and my goal and also passing through the center of the earth. This is to say, in terms of differential geometry, that the unit normal vector to the surface of the earth lies on the same plane as the principle normal to the circle implied by my journey from here to my goal. Then again I could think in terms of a zeroed-out geodesic curvature. This is the more fruitful way of thought since it leads more naturally to abstract rules for curves. And that is the point: to be a human being trying to learn how to think by responding to the ideas the Creator has manifested in Creation, that is, to keep in mind the concrete facts but to also mindfully encapsulate the underlying abstract truths. That way lies a more complete and more perfect understanding of created being and the possibility for a better understanding of the story God is telling with created being.
A simple and almost silly visualization brings the memory that Dante’s pilgrim erred by going on auto-pilot and following the straight-line, the line across an assumed Euclidean plane with no side-forces.
The line of least effort in moving forward. The herd follows that line, the geodesic. Those who veer from mindless movement, to perform acts of good or evil, are the ones who veer from the geodesic. They are the ones who experience forces upon their innermost selves.
But we travel in community groups, though we can hope that they might someday have a character a bit different from a herd of cattle, each of them following the ass ahead… Who do the lead bovines follow? Maybe the herd stretches right around the great circle and the lead bovines are following the asses at the very end of the herd?
In all seriousness, we aim to be individuals and yet members of a morally well-ordered community.
Though it be God who tells the tale in which this community, the Body of Christ, is forming, we do the work in this mortal realm to form the pilgrim Body of Christ, imperfect and incomplete and mortal. And there are some who must lead that pilgrim Body of Christ away from the great circle and towards a better path, a risky path that leads explorers into more dangerous realms. The very shape of our moral-scape is changing. The geodesic curvature is changing but we try hard to follow the path of least effort through that changing moral-scape.
And suppose the effort of trudging through our individual and community lives necessarily increases as we travel up and down slopes which suddenly appeared? We can think we’re working hard to obey God’s will, but maybe we’re still following a least-effort and wrongful path given this hill or mountain which arose in front of us.
And so it is that I contemplate the shape of physical spacetime and the shape of moral spacetime even as I walk down the street, even as I move yard waste to a better spot, even as I read books about gravity or about past ages when men of moral character could still rise to positions of political and social leadership.
I indoctrinate myself not in what serves the purposes of the Principalities and Powers of our age and not what entertains those not interested in pursuing any sort of human excellence. I willfully and deliberately, intentionally, indoctrinate myself in what seems to me to be important and interesting.
I choose the subject of my inquiry and I choose that subject to be God’s Creation as revealed in a mind and imagination shaped and disciplined by responses to the Bible and to Creation and to the Creator.
All that’s left is to do it.